60 Years of Scientific Excellence

When the Cancer Research Institute was founded in 1953, we knew then that immune-based treatments would transform cancer medicine. In more than six decades since, we've made numerous groundbreaking discoveries that have given more patients new hope today.

CRI Scientific Leader Appointed to Chair Named after CRI’s Former Scientific Director

Jedd D. Wolchok, M.D., Ph.D., associate director of the CRI Scientific Advisory Council and director of the CVC Trials Network, has been appointed to the Lloyd J. Old Chair for Clinical Investigation/Virginia and Daniel K. Ludwig Chair in Clinical Investigation at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center. At a July 11, 2013, reception hosted by MSKCC president Craig B. Thompson, M.D., colleagues and friends of Dr. Wolchok gathered to celebrate the appointment. In his remarks, Dr. Wolchok described the tremendous honor of receiving a title named after CRI’s longtime scientific and medical director, Lloyd J. Old, M.D., whose pioneering work in cancer immunotherapy provided much of the foundation for the field today. The chair is also named for Daniel Ludwig, whose fortunes from his shipping empire have funded more than a billion dollars in cancer research since the 1970s, and his wife, Virginia.

In accepting the honor, standing before a portrait of Dr. Old, Dr. Wolchok said, “As you all know, nobody can reach toward lofty goals without the help and support of many others, standing on the proverbial shoulders of giants. For me, this specifically refers to the profound and lasting influence that the namesake of this chair, Dr. Lloyd Old, and the immediate past recipient of the chair, Dr. Alan Houghton, have had on me personally and my career. Lloyd is widely recognized to be the father of modern tumor immunology. His steadfast belief in the field of cancer immunology and dogged insistence that experimentation in this field had to be done in both the laboratory and the clinic has brought us to an extraordinary moment in the use of the immune system to induce durable regressions of advanced cancers. Lloyd’s scientific tenacity and careful, methodical experimentation in both the laboratory and the clinic have already resulted in many lives being saved and innumerable avenues of scientific investigation being opened. I am very grateful to Lloyd and surely hope to carry on my career in this same remarkable spirit.”